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Andrew Farnsworth

Andrew Farnsworth is an expert on the calls of migrating birds at Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology.

READING I read “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson on a recent trans-Pacific flight. It’s a really cool book about WWII-era code breakers and then a whole other narrative that takes place in the late ’90s all about these people trying to create a data haven and then ending up finding this stash of money that the earlier group had left behind. It’s science fiction set in the recent past rather than looking forward way into future.

I am also reading and rereading books that my 3-year-old daughter loves, like “The Big Orange Splot,” which is one of my favorites. Rather than registering for baby stuff, my wife and I told people to give us whatever was your favorite book as a child. As soon as we started to do that I thought, oh man, we have got to get “The Big Orange Splot.”

Photo

Credit
Michael Falco for The New York Times

LISTENING Some nights, I listen to passing nocturnally migrating birds that I can hear from our terrace on East 52nd Street, where I work remotely for Cornell. Sometimes it takes plugging in a microphone that’s pointing up to the sky to hear the calls. It’s one of the things I study. Most of these sounds are less than 100 milliseconds so I do a lot of spectrogram analysis, visualizing the sounds in terms of frequency in time. It’s a way my colleagues and I measure them, and some of us are working on algorithms to identify them. I just returned from a week of birding in southeastern Australia, where I was listening to Superb Lyrebird, Eastern Whipbird and a bunch of really cool species that are not found anywhere near Manhattan.

WATCHING Most of my watching is of birds, whether in the sky or on radar. I don’t watch much actual television on television, instead getting my fix streaming “Burn Notice,” and “Strike Back” because I like spy and conspiracy stuff — the notion of trying to abstract patterns out of nonsense. Also I’ve been watching the original “Cosmos,” parts of which only could have been done with sincerity in the ’80s.

FOLLOWING I have been following a blog called the Weather Centre so I can keep current and make sense of climatic patterns and predictions about weather for the next 6 to 12 months that might help me make longer-term predictions of what birds are going to do in response.

PLAYING I play guitar, specifically one by Rolf Spuler, which Béla Fleck once referred to as the Swiss Army guitar because it’s a bizarre-shaped thing. I have a great band called Mectapus that plays together slightly more frequently than Halley’s comet appears.

Kate Murphy is a journalist in Houston who writes frequently for The New York Times.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 27, 2013, on page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline: Andrew Farnsworth. Today's Paper|Subscribe